Observations from ESO’s Very Large Telescope in Chile and other observatories around the world show that this unique object was traveling through space for millions of years before its chance encounter with our star system. It appears to be a dark, reddish, highly-elongated rocky or high-metal-content object. – European Southern Observatory, Nov. 20, 2017 Science […]
Month: November 2017
A couple of months ago, I wrote about a woman in Puerto Rico who posted a picture of her chicken soup in a Facebook group for lovers of a kitchen gadget called the Instant Pot. We’ve heard a lot of news about the devastation and sluggish pace of recovery in Puerto Rico, but I wanted […]
There is a semi-annual ceremony in the Vance house. At some point – perhaps after a sudden trip to the nursery or an impulse stop at a roadside garden – I bring in a bunch of new plants to the house. Then I remove the carcasses of the ones who have not survived the twisted […]
Since I wrote this post a few months ago, the beloved books mentioned here have been joined on our shelves by Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls 2 (the brand-new and very worthy sequel to Rebel Girls, described below) and Women in Science: 50 Fearless Pioneers Who Changed the World. Now, after this year of extraordinary […]
The Last Word November 20-24, 2017 Sarah changed her landscape, and finds herself changed. I never meant to be one of those people who would trade redrock bones of desert and mountain crags and the velvet nakedness of tundra for the claustrophobic press of forest. For a place so green and eager to grow that […]
Rebecca I have the worst memory. I say this a lot, and I worry about it a lot. I forget meaningful details, or snippets of conversations I know are important. I forget to whom I’ve told something, and then I tell them again, and sometimes they look at me funny and I realize I’m […]
Craig I like to think that being thankful carries weight, that it occupies an influential space in the world. In a series of 2003 studies published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, subjects kept journals reporting their levels of gratitude. Each of three studies found that people who experienced more gratitude “exhibited heightened […]
If you are planning a huge, calorie-dense feast for dinner later this week, you might want to take a moment to thank a man you’ve likely never heard of—a man whose scientific breakthroughs in agriculture made food cheaper and more plentiful around the world. Norman Borlaug may have saved up to a billion lives by […]
